Case of two terrorist Khans opens can of worms

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The Times front page which has upset Whitehall

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Mohammed Siddique Khan

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Ajmal Khan was traced by American agents

By Philip Johnston

12:01AM BST 21 Jun 2006

It was a sensational story. According to a new book, being serialised in The Times, American intelligence agents had tipped off MI5 in 2003 about the risk posed by Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the London suicide bombers.

This ''revelation'' had serious implications.

Not only did it suggest that the security service had failed properly to keep tabs on a man who went on to perpetrate Britain's worst terrorist atrocity; it also meant they had been lying about what they knew.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, had told the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that investigations after the July 7 attack showed that Khan had featured as a peripheral figure in their investigations of other plots but they had not known who he was.

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So, the claim in the book One Percent Doctrine, written by Ron Suskind, an American author, that Khan was considered such a dangerous threat that he was banned from America two years before last year's attack and that British intelligence officials knew this was as serious as it could get.

It was splashed across the front of The Times on Monday and the allegation was repeated yesterday. The story was carried prominently in hundreds of newspapers and media outlets around the world.

Opposition spokesmen, including David Davis, the shadow home secretary, called for a public inquiry. The only problem is that there is no evidence to back up this allegation.

There had, indeed, been a Mohammed Khan from England about whom the Americans were concerned and who had, as the book reported, been involved with a jihadist movement in Virginia.

But it was not Mohammed Siddique Khan, a Yorkshire teacher who is not known to have visited America in recent years, but Mohammed Ajmal Khan, from Coventry, who is serving nine years in a British prison.

There was perplexity in Whitehall yesterday when The Times continued to report that Mohammed Siddique Khan was the individual linked to a group of Islamists operating out of Falls Church, Virginia. Its report said British agents had "traced 7/7 terror links to smalltown America''.

This is emphatically denied by security sources. But it is the case that Mohammed Ajmal Khan was linked to the Virginia group. This came out in his appearance at Snaresbrook Crown Court, east London, in March when he pleaded guilty to directing terrorism and providing weapons and funds to Lashkar-i-Toiba, a group fighting against India in Kashmir.

Suskind and The Times made other claims about Khan that fit the profile of the jailed man from Coventry rather than the suicide bomber from Dewsbury.

For instance, Ajmal Khan's communications across the Atlantic were intercepted by the US National Security Agency and he was linked during a terrorist trial to Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was found guilty of terrorist offences in Virginia last year.

Ajmal Khan had also visited America regularly and talked about blowing up synagogues. More pertinently, the FBI case officer who investigated Ajmal Khan's links to the Falls Church jihadists was Dan Coleman, now retired, who is named in Suskind's book as one of his chief sources.

Could they have mixed up the Khans? Mr Coleman did not reply to phone calls or to an e-mail, but Suskind said he remained convinced that his story was accurate.

''In my investigation and in my book and in my conversations with people in the US government, there was no mistake or doubt that we are talking about Mohammed Siddique Khan, not Mohammed Ajmal Khan,'' he said.

Suskind said he knew the difference between the two and suggested that embarrassed officials in London were trying to divert attention from the mistakes they had made. ''There has been no misidentification,'' he said.

But while there is ample evidence of Ajmal Khan's links to American jihadists, and to the CIA's monitoring of him, there is none concerning Siddique Khan.

For the Suskind theory to work, both Khans needed to be in Virginia at about the same time and to have made exactly the same connections among Islamists in Falls Church, a town of 11,000 people.

Yet whereas British authorities were alerted to Ajmal Khan and acted upon US concerns by arresting him, they supposedly did nothing about Siddique Khan, allowing him to continue the July 7 plot.

Given that 52 innocent people were killed in the London bombs, this is an extremely serious accusation that has caused anger and dismay in some quarters in Whitehall.